School Development and Individualized Education

By Adela Rogojinaru, Scientific Head Researcher, Educational Sciences Institute
Source: Rromathan, Studii despre Rromi, 1997

In collaboration with other institutions, the Foundation for an Open Society supports schooling development programmes for communities with Roma inhabitants. Adela Rogojinaru presents the principles of this programme and expounds an interesting critique of the Romanian pedagogical-hegemonic model. Her study is an excellent argumentation of the fact that a liberal education requires anthropologically well-informed educators.

Preliminaries - Initiation of a Complex Intervening Programme for Communities with Roma Inhabitants

The initiatives for priority actions in zones with Roma inhabitants have increased as a result of the political openings after 1989, and, no doubt, under the pressure of European policies. Moreover, the Romanian educational actuality has always described the schooling marginalization phenomena only at a level of principles. Besides, or perhaps as a consequence of these facts, individualization of pedagogical procedures seems to be a familiar, depleted, even worthless practice to the teacher. Because of the ideological stiffening of the para-scientific schooling discourse and the invocation of circumstances, especially when obtaining didactic degrees and during inspections - the principle of individualization has effaced its vocation: that one to offer situations of learning that truly match each individual and are not built on a pedagogical or social prototype.

The peripheral state of a school-aged population category is not easy to accept. The statement that in certain peripheral or "outskirts" schools there is a poorer education than in the urban zones or that in the rural areas there are fewer qualified pedagogues than in the cities has been for a long time a symptom of depreciating the quality of education. Moreover, an assertion that teachers, parents and authorities all agree on is that not all children are capable to realize the performances of a school programme in the same degree. All the same, the conception about education, even in the variants of the process reform, continue to treat the child engaged in the school system in the spirit of a fake school-"egalitarianism" concept, whether inseparably (thus non-individualized) or elitist (discriminatory).

At the beginning of the school-year 1996/1997, the initiative of the Foundation for an Open Society for extending the social action programmes to the underprivileged areas has luckily coincided with the plans of the Educational Sciences Institute to launch primary educational programmes, as well as with the proposition of the ECOLECT Project of the Romanian Lecture Association for an alternative methodology of reading-writing and lecturing. The initiation of an intervention programme is neither new nor unexpected, being required today by reasons of political correctness. However, it is new and favorable the complex treatment of the Roma's situation including diverse categories of specialists, trainees, and volunteered social workers in order to accomplish through education the coexistence of different, but conciliatory values.

The first observations, results of collecting empirical data in the investigated communities , have drawn attention to the role of institutionalized education in defining the social coexistence forms of Roma families from poor or peripheral environment. Public opinion polls and assigned groups organized by volunteered students pointed to the fact that school is an institution formally respected, but with no direct influence on the professional aspirations of families or of the children themselves. Far from offering self-formation examples or from directing social aspirations, school has become an artificial medium that is attended by children because they are obliged to . Some answers mirroring the aspirations of Roma children show that the social realization level does not exceed the preference for pseudo- professional occupations offering easy profits. In spite of the pedagogical insistence for a competent and long-lasting education, the options of children and parents assume no form of communal commitment. Connected to this the fact that pedagogical procedures as well as teacher education are based on a national curriculum determines very slightly the option of teachers for adaptation to the local context. Fading of the communal identity in semi-urban or outskirts areas, inhabited by settled Roma, take a stand on the cohesion of values and of minority groups' aspirations. The discussion of the identity problem becomes even more delicate when considering the special status of the settled Roma, whose children attend the district-schools: the assimilation of majority norms is contrasted to the preservation of customary rights.

The aspects of communal civilization not connected to schooling, but with concerning the social protection, sanitary education and legal forms offer a different type of observation. By the extension of social actions, included in the schooling programmes for Roma children, partly conceived by different Roma organizations, the schooling development programme launched a global procedure of communal aid, thus providing a method to control different intervention types. The beneficent co-operation of the UNICEF and the local institutions with decisional right (the district's town hall and the school inspectorate) could cover within the programme of the Soros Foundation different problems as well, such as family education, connected especially to counseling and implying women into public life. Paying no special regards to the ethnic emancipation of the Roma minority, the educational programme is still constructed upon the hypothesis of improving inter-group cultural relations (Romanians- Roma). Although supported with data, the "majority- minority" distinction assumes in a fake way a superiority that generates conflicts. It is not the argument of "integration" (nomina odiosa!) that sustains the structure of educational procedure, but the one of the cultural individuality's respect.

EDUCATION FOR ALTERATION: FORMS OF CO-OPERATION IN EDUCATION

Making teachers able to organize co-operative education, has been, both hypothetically and as a result of empirical data, the effective method to modify the inner culture of the pupils' class. The excessive competitive spirit and individualism arising from the family's ambitions have lead to a deterioration of the co-operative atmosphere within a collective. If, in addition to this, the group is also culturally heterogeneous, and intercultural disagreements are to be found on a social plan, then the pupil-collective will divide in function of the dominant cultural model. In a group of Romanian and Roma children, the dominant model will be the "Romanian" one, on one hand because the teacher imposes it, on the other hand because the Roma, even when forming a majority, do not have a good communal reputation (there are individual exceptions, which sometimes can determine a coexistence rule). Moreover, the school curriculum, both the one prescribed as a school-policy document and the one that is actualized in the class, do not produce any methodological instrument to allow particularization of the content in relation to the reference-culture of children . Thus individualization of education remains a pedagogical illusion. Individual values are prototyped in the lectures through characters of no relevance for a considerable part of the children-group, who could evoke their own heroes, if they were allowed to. The practical abilities - such as counting - are also scientifically canonized. The Roma children, capable enough of counting their money when shopping, can not promote in Mathematics. Although orally excellent, the same children prove to be incapable of telling a story at the reading- classes or to express themselves coherently at the "Communication" classes. The effects are shift onto the parents' negligence for school or onto the intellectual incapability of the children. As a matter of fact we, educators, only want to perpetuate the lapsed gesture of the "similar" and to exclude, consciously or ignorantly, the education of the " not similar" ones. Categorizations connected to the unsociability or abnormality of the Roma in terms with the Romanian majority originate from the unusual judgment of the "different" treated as distortion of the "normal". Above all cultural anthropological values, we can state that, generally, the public schools' practice restores the elimination of differences, based on an instruction "equal for all".

Considering this, the workshops for preparing pilot class-teachers from the Ferentari schools had examined a few restructuring methods of learning:

1. by analyzing the personal model of the teacher's value;
2. by analyzing the personal model of the children's value, from each community's classes, and by comparing both universes of reference;
3. by creating certain alternative learning situations: starting with individual and highly competitive learning, up to learning co-operatively, in group;
4. by partial reprocessing of the didactic act and exchanging the guided teaching forms for co-participating teaching forms.

Contrary to the normal procedures, this re-thinking of the organizational ways of learning does not annihilate individual learning or the acts of originality. The objectives of this shaping transition were primarily subjecting the teacher's professional qualities, and by this, encouraging the teacher to adopt teaching methods, that would lead the children:

1. to know each other through dialogue;
2. to relate to each other without emitting discrimination;
3. to co-operate on a common cause;
4. to evaluate reciprocally in terms of a common cause;
5. to approach their own achievements considering each other's opinion.

An educational individualization programme involves particular, but not exclusive procedures. The benefit of the programme does not exclusively refer to Roma children, but the whole community of children's group. The positive discrimination of the minorities seems to be as much injurious as the separation. The programme proposes itself to follow the dynamics of intercultural groups and to educate the communal behavior, even more now, when, on a social level, Romanians and Roma live together in a peripheral, or so to speak condemned community (just like the Ferentari district). On the other hand, the efforts of schooling the Roma as well as the ones of alphabetizing in Roma language, which are undertaken nowadays on a large scale by all the important Roma organizations, remain imperceptible, concerning the affirmation of the minorities worth in assorted communities. Re-gaining the language does not automatically restore the group identity of the Roma living in community. Adopting the group assets in a local school's curriculum and their inclusion into an individualized education are within the few normal forms, through which, by the members of a majority collective, a micro-culture is recognized and comprehended. Prior to a political dialogue, the multicultural condition is assumed at a pedagogical level, even by simple schoolbook illustrations with faces of different children, which do not hide (like in Porojan's case) that the one, whose friendship is so much appreciated by the narrator, happens to be "Gypsy".

EXPANSION OF THE PEDAGOGICAL PROGRAMME:

The Lecture Club

The pedagogical type of intervention, focused on assuming identity assets to the level of communal transfer's model - role assumed by the institutionalized educator - had been sustained from the beginning through a complemented activity, which should encourage children's personal culture. The objectives of the Lecture Club aimed:

1. cultivating a micro-culture of group;
2. cultivating personal expression and interpersonal communication;
3. development of artistic expression;
4. activating the traditional cultural base (familial) by artistic expression and lecture.

The club had invited children from classes I-IV of the 136th School from Ferentari, Roma as well as Romanians, and had worked with them in weekly gatherings. The coordinator of the club's activities, schoolteacher Mihaela Zatreanu, had followed the children's activity in the following domains:

• narrator;

• reader;

• listener;

• creator.

The children narrated, sketched their tales, read and listened to each other's tale. The unconventional narrating had constituted the first phase of the club's process. Extracted from the life-experience of children, those merge the realistic with the fantastic, helping free self-expression. A second phase of story-elaboration, which starts with school-year 1997/1998, will cultivate the ethnic narrating, trying to cite the thesaurus of traditional images still active in Roma communities. Both types of narration are destined to create a portfolio of literature for children, publishable in an anthology. Such an anthology would constitute an authentic didactical support to develop the functional capacities of lecture and writing within primary classes and would offer a first intervention upon local adaptation to the recommendations of the school's curriculum. If such pedagogical expansion is able to create sufficient support to restore the identity of small and peripheral cultures, it can be generalized to the level of the educational system - to the level of optional curricular areas.

SOME CONCLUSIONS

The domains of the school-process' programme in Roma communities related or only sketched here, represent, at the same time, faces of a different social procedure: one, in which the person, for whom help is offered, takes part of the global action directed towards him. This type of investigation through action (close to the research-action procedure, but less evident in the bases of the investigation and more clear in the ones of intervention) seems to be one of the few which, nowadays, can be successful in the process of changing mentality and of displacing assets. The interest for marginal areas seems to discover not only the potential of communal micro-cultures, but also the central system's capacity itself (system of social, cultural, moral, etc. assets) to regenerate in flexible structures. The educational field, most vulnerable while changing, receives and induces at the same time an important generative influence for the rest of the social system. From this point of view, any kind of influence through education has chances to transform in effect on long term, in spite of any other results, immediate and more pronounced, which we are able to obtain from economical assistance or from unanimous financial maintenance.